Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Every Tuesday they post a new Top Ten list prompt. This week’s list is the Top Ten Most Anticipated Releases For the Rest of 2015.
I’d love to hear what you think – are there any books you are anxiously awaiting? Let me know in the comments! If you have a blog and would like to create your own list, feel free to leave a link to your post.
Aaron S, you’ve won the Crazy Mountain Kiss giveaway! You should be receiving an email shortly. Please respond with your mailing address as quickly as possible so the publisher can mail your prize. Congratulations!
The Forgotten Room by Lincoln Child
Random House Audio – Narrated by Johnathan McClain
Genre : Thriller
Series : Dr Jeremy Logan #4
My Rating: *** (3 of 5 stars)
I am a big fan of both Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston, whether writing on their own or together as a team. I’m always excited when one of them has a new book published, so I was really looking forward to this one. I enjoyed the first three books in this series (LOVED #1 and #2), and I really wanted to love this book too. I have to admit that I was disappointed. It is still a good book, just not the great book that I was hoping for.
What are you reading Wednesday – 6/3/15
What Are You Reading Wednesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Its A Reading Thing. To participate, open your current read to page 34 and answer the three questions listed below. If you have a blog, feel free to leave a link down in the comments so that others can visit and see your post. If you don’t, just leave a note with your answers.
The Questions are:
1. What’s the name of your current read?
2. Go to page 34 in your book or 34% in your eBook and share one complete sentence. (or two!)
3. Would you like to live in the world that exists within your book? Why or why not?
My Answers this week:
1. The Devil’s Music by Pearl R. Meaker
2. The witch accusations all eventually fizzled out, but the Twombleys never lost their reputation for strangeness. They usually seemed to get what they wanted without becoming tyrants in the process.
3. I already live in Illinois, but not in a college town. I think I would enjoy this serene university environment, as long as the murder had been solved long before I arrived, and I could live on campus as a professor rather than a student! 🙂
Top Ten Books I’d Love To See As Movies or Tv Shows
Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Every Tuesday they post a new Top Ten list prompt. This week’s list is the Top Ten books I’d like to see as movies or TV shows. The first several I thought of have already been made into TV shows and / or movies, so this was harder than I expected! 🙂
I’d love to hear what your thoughts – anything you’d add to the list? Let me know in the comments, and if you have a blog, create your own Top Ten list! Just be sure to link back to The Broke and the Bookish, and feel free to leave a link to your post in the comments here, too.
Giveaway! The publisher has generously offered one copy of Crazy Mountain Kiss (read my review) by Keith McCafferty. The winner will also receive one copy of the paperback of Dead Man’s Fancy (Sean Stranahan #3). It’s a Rafflecopter giveaway – enter here!
Contest ends 6/5/15. Good luck!
Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty
A Sean Stranahan Mystery – #4
Release date – June 9, 2015
My Rating *** (3 of 5 stars)
***NOTE: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review***
From Goodreads:
It’s April, but there’s still snow on the Montana mountains the day a member of the Madison River Liar and Fly Tiers club finds a Santa hat in the chimney of his rented cabin. With the flue clogged and desperate to make a fire, he climbs up to the roof, only to find the body of a teenage girl wedged into the chimney. When Sheriff Martha Ettinger and her team arrive to extract the body they identify the victim as Cinderella “Cindy” Huntingdon, a promising young rodeo star, missing since November. (read more)
Crazy Mountain Kiss takes place in the Crazy Mountains of Montana. The corpse of a young girl who went missing months earlier has been found in the chimney of a rental cabin. The sheriff and her team, along with Sean Stranahan, a private detective, investigate to discover where the girl has been since her disappearance, and the events that lead to her death.
There are almost as many people trying to impede the investigation in some way as there are individuals trying to locate Cinderella’s trail. A mix of law enforcement, ranch people, and other colorful (and at times unsavory) characters keep the story interesting. The author does a good job of casting suspicion first one way and then another, keeping me guessing all the way through. I like mystery novels that manage to keep me from figuring out who the culprit is too soon in the story, but that haven’t kept some important detail hidden up to the end. This novel is like that. You are privy to every detail Sean Stranahan uncovers as he questions Cinderella’s family and acquaintances and searches for clues.
I did feel a little confused at the main characters relationships near the beginning, but since this is the fourth book in a series (but the first one I have read) that isn’t too surprising. The author does let you in on what is going on with the main characters, but I think I might have liked the story more and the characters might have mattered a little more to me if I had started at the beginning and had more backstory for them.
All in all, this was a good mystery. I would recommend it to fans of the Longmire series by Craig Johnson.
Warning: Mature content – some language and brief sex scenes
You can find purchase links and more on Keith McCafferty’s website
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch
Audiobook Narrated by Adam Paul
Genre: SciFi (Cyberpunk) / Mystery
My Rating: **** (4 of 5 stars)
I had a hard time deciding how to rate this book at first because of the subject matter. The story is somewhat more disturbing than what I normally read, but it is a murder mystery as well as sci-fi, so you have to expect some unpleasantness. There are some terrible people doing terrible things. There are also some not so terrible, everyday people accepting, and occasionally even enjoying, terrible things. The worst (or best depending on how you look at it) part of it all is how believable everything is. In the end though, I did enjoy the book and decided that it deserves 4 stars. It is a very well thought out and well-written story that kept me listening every minute I could until it was finished.
Tomorrow and tomorrow is set in the not-so-distant future. People use implants called Adware to email and connect with other people they run into, and to deliver streaming content right to their eyes, 24 hours a day. The targeted marketing being used by the advertisers in this book will feel familiar to anyone who has ever browsed the web, and it’s so close to current reality that you never even question the technology.
In this future America, Philadelphia has been wiped out by a terrorist attack. John Dominic Blaxton, who lost his wife in the attack, works for an agency that researches deaths for an insurance agency. There are so many cameras everywhere, that a digital archive of the city has been created, and people are able to virtually visit the city and the people who once lived there. When a claim is made against a life insurance policy claiming that someone died in the blast, Dominic’s job is to go into this archive to find the person at the time of the explosion and prove that they did actually die when the bomb that took out the city went off.
In a nutshell (and to keep myself from giving away anything important), Dominic uncovers things he was never meant to find and ends up running for his life. While trying to stay alive, he is also trying to piece together the last moments of a murder victim’s timeline, and find the person responsible for deleting another woman’s images from the archive.
The narrator, Adam Paul, did a great job and I’m really glad I listened to this one. The first few minutes, I was annoyed by his voice, but it grows on you, and his style fits the story well. (If anyone has listened to William Gibson reading Neuromancer, you’ll probably understand what I mean!) He also did a great job of expressing Dominic’s anguish, shock, and frustration when appropriate.
Whether you prefer to read or listen to your books, I would recommend this one to scifi fans, as long as you don’t have a weak stomach. 🙂
WARNING (in case you prefer not to read this sort of thing): There are some graphic descriptions of violence, and graphic descriptions of corpses along with some vulgar language.
Visit Thomas Sweterlitsch’s website (be sure to check out the Adware page)
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What are you reading Wednesday – 5/27/15
What Are You Reading Wednesdays is a weekly meme hosted by Its A Reading Thing. To participate, just use the book you’re currently reading to answer these questions. If you have a blog, feel free to leave a link to your post so others can visit and see your post. If you don’t, you can just leave your answers in the comments below.
The Questions are:
1. What’s the name of your current read?
2. Go to page 34 in your book or 34% in your eBook and share one complete sentence.
3. Would you like to live in the world that exists within your book? Why or why not?
My Answers this week:
1. Crazy Mountain Kiss by Keith McCafferty (Sean Stranahan Mystery #4)
2. She propped the book on her chest, thinking about Gallagher, who had the blackguard’s insolence and devilish looks, and wondered at the color of his heart.
3. If we can remove the murder and just talk about the setting, then yes, I wouldn’t mind living in or visiting the Crazy Mountains. They seem a bit isolated, but if it didn’t get too lonely, it would be a peaceful place to be. For a while, anyway!
Now tell me what you are reading this week! 🙂
Eden at the Edge of Midnight by John Kerry
***NOTE: I received a free copy of this book from StoryCartel in exchange for an honest review***
Genre: YA / Fantasy
My Rating **** (4 of 5 stars)
Synopsis from Goodreads:
The Vara of Yima, the original Garden of Eden, sealed from the rest of the world and populated with the fittest of men and women. A secret paradise that 150 years ago became ravaged by smog that choked out the skies.
Now the Vara exists in a permanent state of darkness and its people need a champion, a chosen one to save them from the smog that threatens to fill the realm…(read more)
Finally finished – I didn’t want one more What-Are-You-Reading-Wednesday post featuring the same book! 🙂
This was a well-written fantasy with well defined and realistic characters. That always makes it so much easier to be concerned for their well-being, and I did care what happened to Sammy and her companions. Sammy is an average human teenage girl who finds herself alone on a strange world, trying to survive and find her way home. Along with her new-found companions Mehrak, and his dinosaur/house Louis, Sammy has to escape the crabmen, figure out whether or not she might be the golden haired child of prophecy, decide which of those claiming to be trying to help her are actually on her side, and find the book that might show her the way to get back home to Earth.
I started to panic about 20 pages from the end because I knew there was not enough time for everything that I wanted to happen, to happen! Thankfully book 2 is on the way, but now I have to wait until October to read Back to the Vara.
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The Book's the Thing 